Wikipedia:Gather/Gather Summary paper - January 2016

The WMF acknowledges that the RFC to disable Gather in beta exists and that this is a serious step from the English Wikimedia Community. We are working within the time allotted by the RFC process to have a structured internal discussion. In the spirit of transparency, I am publishing a position paper that we are using as the basis for this discussion.

Purpose of this document

This document is meant to summarize, in as neutral language as possible, the situation around the Gather feature and present possible responses to the community RFC to disable the feature. It is not meant to be a comprehensive response to any of the concerns raised or to discuss longer range plans for the feature.

History

Gather is a feature that allows users to create lists of articles and share them publicly. Gather was deployed as an English Wikipedia beta feature in March 2015. The English Wikipedia community almost immediately responded with negative feedback. In April of 2015, when the Reading team was created, the future of Gather was unclear and it was left in beta.

After the Reading team finished its strategic planning in November of 2015, further experimentation with the feature was moved to the Android platform with a modified roadmap that focused on private lists (functioning like bookmarks) in the next quarter.

In late January 2016, the community rekindled the discussion and opened a RFC to disable Gather on English Wikipedia beta. To be clear, the RFC, opened on January 26th, 2016, only calls for the disabling of the feature in beta until a discussion can be had on Gather’s future.

Community Concerns

Norms and Values

Communities have rules and values governing behavior and Wikipedia communities are no different. The largest wikis tend to have the most well-developed and articulated values because they have had to deal with the widest variety of challenges and circumstances. Feedback from members of the English Wikipedia community have highlighted three areas where Gather violates community values.

Lack of Moderation Tools

Gather is a system that creates content in the form of lists and a core community value is the ability to moderate content. Risker has created a document where she has enumerated the importance of and mechanisms that are required in moderation systems for the english wiki community. This document lists several reasons that moderation of content is necessary for the English Wikipedia:

• Major biographies of living persons violations ranging all the way to material that is clearly and obviously libelous, seriously insulting or otherwise harmful
• Often unintended disclosure of non-public personal information such as telephone numbers, identification numbers, email addresses, health conditions, and other material, or intentional disclosure of non-public personal information of a third party
• Spam
• Threats of violence
• Copyright violations and violations of the project's licensing requirements
• Otherwise unsuitable materials and materials that are otherwise violations of the terms of use.

The specific concern with Gather is that it cannot be moderated using existing community workflows and tools.

Non-Encyclopedic Content

Another area where Gather is problematic to the community is the fact that lists aren’t considered encyclopedic content by some community members. This is known as the first of the Five Pillars of Wikipedia, which are ”[t]he fundamental principles of Wikipedia”

Non-Free Images

English Wikipedia has a content policy about the use of fair-use image which some community members have identified as an issue with Gather. I don’t have deep knowledge of the subtleties of this issue so I can’t write a more in-depth summary and will defer to the policy page above.

Development Practices

The community has also identified several development practices that certain members find objectionable.

Transparency

The Community has pointed out that the feature was developed without community notification or consultation. A FAQ was created after development work had started which clearly did not give the community ample time to provide feedback before the feature was launched.

Resources used to develop new features not existing community needs

Community members have pointed out that Gather is very similar to existing features of watchlists and the books extension. There are a number of enhancement requests for both features and it has been asked why these requests are not addressed before new development was begun.

Use of the Beta Environment

There has also been feedback that the feature was released into the beta environment and not updated for many months.

Usage Metrics

While Gather has been only deployed in English Wikipedia’s beta environment, it has received regular use. The following statistics were retrieved at the end of 2015 and illustrate the level of engagement of the feature from March to December 2015.

Numbers

Metric	Number
Number of collections that have descriptions	3198
Number of collections with images	5393
Number of collections with more than one item	8289
Total number of public collections	22419

Positive Feedback

Some community members have expressed positive feedback about the feature, praising the direction and the ideas. However, these same community members have expressed concern about the implementation. Also, there are more than 20 users with more than 20 collections; one user has created more than 300.

Next Steps

The Reading team is meeting to discuss the Gather RFC on Tuesday, February 6th. I will share the results of this meeting with the Community as well as any additional information or context.